I grew up in England from the age of seven. All those who've had a pop at me recently on social media for not supporting their send-them-victorious football's-coming-home (' only joking' according to Lineker!) team, please note. My family moved there from Aberystwyth. My mum hailed from Gwlad yr haf ( Somerset) but grew up and went to Uni in Aber, where she eventually settled as well. She was a weird combo of lefty and bigot : pro-Soviet yet furiously anti-Welsh language; she would've been a member of CND at the same time as campaigning against Welsh language education and dubbing the Urdd the 'Welsh Hitler Youth'! My dad was equally anti-Cymraeg : though a Barri boy through and through , his job with the Ministry of Agriculture involved communicating with a lot of Welsh-speaking farmers and , a monoglot, he couldn't abide by what he saw as their mockery. Ironically , both his parents were from Welsh-speaking families, one from Cilfynydd and the other Wenvoe. Just about the only thing they shared ( apart from our council house in Penparcau) was a loathing of Welsh. At first I really liked Cambridge simply because I could cycle everywhere, support the team just down the road ( Cambridge City) and, for a while, explore the wildness of an area soon transformed into a new housing estate. I disliked the piss-taking of my strong west Walian accent, though never adopted the cockneyfied speech of the city ( I was normally a starling when it came to such matters). It now seems strange to imagine my heroes wandering the self-same streets and that I could've passed Syd Barrett on his 'I've gotta bike', or under the window of a college room where Ted Hughes was ravishing Sylvia Plath. On Granchester Meadows we swiped away wasps and my mum talked about one Rupert Brooke, who I mistook for a fictional bear. My dad soon lost his safe-as-houses Civil Service job and was delivering booze for an offie for a while. I recall him almost knocking a policeman flat when driving in the city when he got into one of his notorious explosive tantrums, which could be particularly scary if there were knives around. I was such a good singer at 11 that my mother wanted to enrol me for the famous King's College Chapel school ( actually, I knew she just wanted to elope with our lodger, who later became my step-father). I played football for the City team and that was the height of my career : a right-footed left-winger long before they became fashionable. In 1966 everyone supported England, even the Welsh boys like myself( though most only played rugby)and having switched allegiances to Everton ( just because I liked the name), it was more a matter of following the unsung left-back Ray Wilson. Until I discovered Dylan Thomas's story 'Peaches' at Grammar and R.S. Thomas's 'Cynddylan on a tractor' ,I saw my country of birth as a place of holidays : the Knap, the Island and the paddle steamer over to my mother's country. However, one school trip was organised to Aber itself , where my grandparents still lived and where we stayed at a Junior School just outside. Despite being Grammar boys, we marauded the shops like a pillaging tribe of invaders and when they talked sincerely about locals living in caves I didn't correct them. It was only when when my parents separated and my mum and I moved to a small village on the Suffolk border that I discovered the true meaning of community. Until I was 16 at least, my friends were working- and middle-class :the sons and daughters of farm workers, factory workers, vicar and shop-keeper and only the posh daughters of the wealthy landowner stayed clear. Cymru was confined to that story and poem, to my mother and sister orating Dylan and myself responding with R.S. It exposed my mum's contradictions : besotted with Dylan yet hating Cymraeg. When my mother eventually did elope with my step-father leaving me virtually homeless, I had no choice. I simply looked up at the noticeboard on the station, saw 'Cardiff' and thought 'Barry'. Likewise, Aber was the obvious place to go to study. I was ,indeed, going back to the future ( or, more accurately, forward to the past). With my parents, I had learnt to do and think the opposite of their example. I hardly conceived of myself as having a 'nationality' or strong identity in those terms then. I had accepted in England that English and British were much the same, yet there were always yearnings, stirrings ( what could be called 'hiraeth') in the spell of those writers' words and in my desire to return.

MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME HOW TO STEALMy mother taught me how to steal ;our garden path made from brickscarefully laid towards the tree,we filched from the builder’s yard,a dusk raid across a busy road.Our garden bloomed rarewith exotic plants she’d concealedfurtively from the city’s Botanic Gardens,her first class Biology degreeuseful when it came to Latin names.My own bricks and plantswere books rapidly tuckedinto my duffle coat, literature and history,even a fad for Agatha Christie ;pens and pencils from Wooliesnever believing I’d be caught.I trod their unsteady waysin many strange countries,tended and cultivated characterswho grew within me.My mother taught me how to stealbut not how to give :I never once handled a presentas I did that high wooden gatein torchlight, nervous and excited,outlaws gloved in the dark.​